How can I get rid of the extra space between the rows and columns in a table?

Published: 13 February 2022

Category: html

Tag: css, html

Problem

How can I get rid of the additional space in the table between the rows and columns?

On the table, tr, and td, I’ve tried altering the margin, padding, and different border attributes.

I want all of the photos to be next to one other, as if they were one large image.

What should I do about it?

CSS

table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
}

HTML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
  <title>Tera Byte Video Game Creation Camp</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css"></link>
</head>

<body>
  <table class="mytable" align="center">
    <tr class="header">
      <td colspan="3"><img src="images/home_01.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="top">
      <td colspan="3"><img src="images/home_02.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="link-row">
      <td><img src="images/home_03.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_04.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_05.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="link-row">
      <td><img src="images/home_07.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_06.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_08.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="link-row">
      <td><img src="images/home_09.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_10.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_11.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="link-row">
      <td><img src="images/home_12.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_13.png" /></td>
      <td><img src="images/home_14.png" /></td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="bottom">
      <td colspan="3"><img src="images/home_15.png" /></td>
    </tr>
  </table>

</body>

</html>

Asked by Zach Galant

Solution #1

To add to vectran’s response, the table element’s cellspacing property must also be set for cross-browser compatibility.

<table cellspacing="0">

EDIT (I’m expanding this 5 years later for completeness’ sake:):

Cellspacing has to be set explicitly as a table attribute in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, or else the spacing wouldn’t disappear.

The CSS property border-spacing is supported by Internet Explorer 8 and later versions, as well as all other common browsers – Chrome, Firefox, and Opera 4+.

You can use the code sample below to implement a cross-browser table cell spacing reset (supporting IE6 as a dinosaur browser):

Answered by easwee

Solution #2

Include the following CSS reset in your CSS code: (From this point)

/* http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ 
   v2.0 | 20110126
   License: none (public domain)
*/

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td,
article, aside, canvas, details, embed, 
figure, figcaption, footer, header, hgroup, 
menu, nav, output, ruby, section, summary,
time, mark, audio, video {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    border: 0;
    font-size: 100%;
    font: inherit;
    vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* HTML5 display-role reset for older browsers */
article, aside, details, figcaption, figure, 
footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section {
    display: block;
}
body {
    line-height: 1;
}
ol, ul {
    list-style: none;
}
blockquote, q {
    quotes: none;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
    content: '';
    content: none;
}
table {
    border-collapse: collapse;
    border-spacing: 0;
}

It will effectively reset the CSS, removing the padding and margins.

Answered by vectran

Solution #3

This was effective for me:

#table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
  border-spacing: 0;
}

Answered by pagetribe

Solution #4

Use the following for photos in td:

display: block;

For me, this frees up some room.

Answered by Jacob Bertelsen

Solution #5

Just to add to Jacob’s response, for image in td,

body {line-height: 0;}
img {display: block; vertical-align: bottom;}

Most email applications, including Gmail, support this. However, Outlook is not one of them. Two further stages are required for outlook:

table {border-collapse: collapse;}

and make each td element the same height and width as the photos it contains. As an example,

<td width="600" height="80" style="line-height: 80px;">
    <img height="80" src="http://www.website.com/images/Nature_01.jpg" width="600" />
</td>

Answered by hexinpeter

Post is based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2279396/how-to-remove-unwanted-space-between-rows-and-columns-in-table